CityLab | Alexis Zanghihttp://www.citylab.com/authors/alexis-zanghi/2016-09-28T09:14:43-04:00Copyright 2018 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.<p><span><span class="im"><span>By the end of the 1950s, New Haven was receiving more federal funding for urban renewal than any other U.S. city. Its mayor at the time, Richard C. Lee, used his charm and ambition to gain support </span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/01/nyregion/he-who-once-rebuilt-new-haven.html&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1475079892075000&amp;usg=AFQjCNH5ZhxzAwt_WNkedMV9y8BLFFwAmA" href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/01/nyregion/he-who-once-rebuilt-new-haven.html" target="_blank"><span>from U.S. Presidents</span></a><span> and average New Havenites to take on a scale of renewal that earned his city the nickname, “Model City.”</span></span></span></p><p><span><span class="im"><span>The tidal wave of large-scale demolition and construction that took place under Lee—who served as mayor from 1954 to 1970—failed to curb the sprawl, crime, or unemployment that plagued so many Northeast U.S. cities at the time. New Haven sputtered into the 21</span><span>st</span><span> century as a scarred place underneath a layer of well-intended renewal.</span></span></span></p><p><span><span>“The built environment tends to hide conflict,” says architecture historian </span><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&amp;q=http://architecture.yale.edu/faculty/elihu-rubin&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1475079892076000&amp;usg=AFQjCNFcsYXRxHstJtHoiqpkj_DJhL517w" href="http://architecture.yale.edu/faculty/elihu-rubin" target="_blank"><span>Elihu Rubin</span></a><span>. Rubin teaches a course on ghost towns at Yale University. After surveying the ghost towns of the American west, his students turned towards a more local ghost town: the former Oak Street neighborhood, just a few blocks from the School of Architecture’s building in downtown New Haven.</span></span></p><p><span><span>A passerby along Oak Street won’t find boarded up storefronts or abandoned homes. They’ll find a six-lane highway connector, running between I-95 and Route 34, and, eventually, the Merritt Parkway. It divides New Haven’s downtown and Yale’s central campus from the Hill neighborhood and Yale’s medical campus. In the middle of the connector is a central island, featuring the Smilow Cancer Center, a parking garage, and the city’s latest initiative known as the “<a href="http://www.nhregister.com/general-news/20160729/new-haven-lands-another-20-million-grant-for-downtown-crossing-project">Downtown Crossing</a>” project. </span><span>Anchored by the 14-story Alexion building</span><span>,</span><span> </span><span>Downtown Crossing is intended to promote safer streets for vulnerable road users and street-level retail, restoring an active street life to the area decades after urban renewal.</span></span></p><p><span><span>Leaving downtown New Haven on a clear day, you can cross the connector and see the Long Island Sound and Marcel Breuer’s <a href="http://www.docomomo-us.org/register/fiche/pirelli_tire_building">Pirelli building</a> to the south. To the north, the gleaming blue glass of the Alexion building at 100 College Street, the anchor of the Downtown Crossing project. The project includes traffic-calming measures, like dedicated bicycle lanes in the place of previously fast-paced connector on-and-off ramps. It also promises cafes and street retail, reduced car traffic, further real estate development, and additional public spaces, including pocket parks.</span></span></p><p><span><span>Long term, Downtown Crossing will seek to connect downtown, the Hill, and New Haven’s Union Station. In a May 2013 article for </span><em><span>Planning</span></em><span> magazine, urban planner David Fields described the overall effort as seeking to “re-stitch the daily life of the city back together.”</span></span></p><figure><img alt="" height="465" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/09/Screen_Shot_2016_09_27_at_4.10.45_PM/18893f0ff.png" width="620"><figcaption class="credit">(Elihu Rubin)</figcaption></figure><p><span><span>Or, as Rubin puts it, Downtown Crossing is Oak Street’s “21st century makeover.” Lining the connector are sixteen orange and white wayfinding signs set in all caps and designated with the hashtag #OakStreetHistoricalSociety. Developed by Rubin’s students, the signs site historical information and quotes from locals. One sign quotes a former Oak Street resident on his childhood home: “IT WAS A SACRED SPOT. A WORLD. A UNIVERSE.” Another sign informs passers-by of a stat: “one-fifth of New Haven residents were displaced between 1956 and 1974.”</span></span></p><p><span><span>Another sign includes words from then-Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz shortly after construction of the Route 34 connector, calling New Haven, “The greatest success story in the history of the world.” But in fact, the displacement entailed by New Haven’s Model City era is responsible for much of the city’s current traumas. More than 3,000 people—881 households, plus 350 small businesses—were displaced during the Oak Street demolition, with many people moving to the Hill and Newhallville neighborhoods, which remain among New Haven’s poorest.</span></span></p><p><span><span class="im"><span>And while Oak Street is notable in the concentration of its excision, New Haven also shut down more than twenty residential hotels and SROs throughout the Model City, a key form of housing for low-income individuals without families. In her book, </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Model-City-Blues-Organized-Resistance/dp/1592136036"><em><span>Model City Blues</span></em></a><span>, historian Mandi Isaacs Jackson neatly summarizes the intentions and outcome of these twin practices:</span></span></span></p><blockquote>
<p><span><span class="im"><span>Places previously inhabited by the poor and working class would become clean, vibrant, commercially viable space. In New Haven, this new urban center never quite materialized according to plan, but the transformation of the downtown from mixed living, working, and commercial center to prescribed and economically enforced government, arts, parking, and shopping units directly circumscribed the kinds of living choices available to the city’s working class.</span></span></span></p>
</blockquote><p><span><span class="im"><span>This legacy remains. Today, many New Haven households are disproportionately overburdened by housing costs, in part because of city’s low inventory and thus </span><span>extremely low vacancy rates</span><span>. A 2012 survey by local firm DataHaven revealed that housing costs consumed more than 50 percent of household budgets for 39 percent of families in the Hill. A 2015 </span><span>Community Wellbeing Survey</span><span> suggests that nearly one-in-ten New Haven residents struggle to afford housing. Some of the projects created during the urban renewal era are now out of use or no longer in existence: The New Haven Coliseum was demolished in 2007, and the Chapel Square mall—notorious for gang-related shootings during New Haven’s “</span><span>Gun Wavin</span><span>’” 1990s—has been redeveloped into housing.</span></span></span></p><p><span><span class="im"><span>As Rubin says, “the urban historical story that you can’t ignore or avoid [in New Haven] is the urban renewal moment, when there was so much physical and social upheaval in the city.” Once the primary arrival neighborhood for immigrants to New Haven, Oak Street was diverse in its demographic composition save for one common denominator: socioeconomic status. </span></span></span><span><span class="im"><span>Rob Gurwitt once </span><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/09/death-neighborhood"><span>described</span></a><span><a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2000/09/death-neighborhood"> the area</a> for </span><em><span>Mother Jones</span></em><span> as a place where “Jews, Italians, African Americans, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Irish, Greeks and others lived cheek by jowl in long rows of dark, timeworn tenements and cold-water flats with junk-strewn back lots.”</span></span></span></p><figure><img alt="" height="613" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/09/Screen_Shot_2016_09_27_at_4.12.53_PM/3b277bd57.png" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Robert Moses, right, shown with then-New Haven Mayor Richard Lee, March 4, 1958. (AP Photo/John Rooney)</figcaption></figure><p><span><span>Perceived blight in the Oak Street neighborhood was used by Lee and others to legitimize Oak Street’s destruction during his time as mayor. Elihu’s signage project incorporates some of this rhetoric. One, for instance, compares the neighborhood to the “rotten spot from an apple.”</span><span> Eventually, despite resident protests and resistance, 42 acres were seized under </span><a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/348/26/case.html"><em><span>Berman v. Parker</span></em></a><span>, a 1954 Supreme Court case that expanded the principle of eminent domain to include seizing land and private property for the nebulously defined purposes of “public safety, public health, morality, peace and quiet, [and] law and order.” Oak Street was then bulldozed under the 1956 Federal Highway Act.</span></span></p><p><span><span>By presenting oral history and archival research in the every day public sphere, the #OakStreetHistoricalSociety signs link the past with the present, and offer a re-consideration of the future. “Even in the spaces of our cities themselves, signage is a way of marking out history and chapter,” says Elihu. “History doesn’t exist as a fact sheet; it’s possible to remake history.”</span></span></p><!-- START "RELATED STORY" SINGLE STORY BOX v2.0 --><aside class="callout related"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Related Story</h4>
<figure><a href="%5BURL%5D"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2011/10/20/nh-phase%201__thumb.jpg"></a></figure><h4 class="hed"><a href="%5BURL%5D">Debating the Best Road Forward in New Haven</a></h4>
<p class="dek"><a href="%5BURL%5D">The long-awaited Downtown Crossing project has the city buzzing, but some fear it's not making the most of its chance.</a></p>
<hr></aside><!-- END "RELATED STORY" SINGLE STORY BOX --><p><span><span>In 21</span><span>st</span><span> century New Haven, those forces have not evolved much since the Model City era. The embrace of bicycling and use of </span><span>parking spots as patios </span><span>notwithstanding, there are parallels between the displacement created by Oak Street and today’s Downtown Crossing project. For starters, there’s the continued practice of demolition-as-development as well as its ample federal funding (New Haven received a $20 million TIGER grant from the federal Department of Transportation to support the Downtown Crossing project last August after a $16 million grant was disbursed in 2015.) There are also stakeholders who question whether the project will actually do what it says it will: as </span><a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2011/10/new-haven-debating-the-best-road-forward/328/?utm_source=feed"><span>previously noted</span></a><span> in this publication, New Haven’s Urban Design League is critical of the Downtown Crossing project, arguing that it simply replaces one highway with another.</span></span></p><p><span><span>But most consistent of all is how all the urban renewal in New Haven still fails to alleviate poverty in the neighborhoods that evolved after Oak Street’s demolition: neighborhoods like the Hill and Newhallville. In the Hill, for instance, 60 percent of the population lives at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level. The Hill and the area ringing the Route 34 connector currently shoulders roughly a quarter of New Haven’s evictions, based on a recent mapping of eviction data. Units in the Charles Moore-designed Church Street South housing project nearby were </span><a href="http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/church_street_south_endgame_raze_rebuild/"><span>condemned by the city</span></a><span> in 2015; tenants were then shuttled between hotel rooms throughout the New Haven area </span><span>to accommodate Yale’s parents weekend</span><span>.</span></span></p><p><span><span class="im"><span>“New Haven continues to be a city that is deeply uneven in its economic recovery or in the vigor of its redevelopment,” says Rubin, with neighborhoods that remain “deeply under-served by both the private and public sectors.”</span></span></span></p><p><span><span>This is perhaps the biggest connective tissue between the Model City era and New Haven today. For all the city’s enthusiastic embrace of an active street life and new development, there are neighborhoods that still bear the outcomes of well-intended but ill-conceived decisions made a generation ago. To this end, the #OakStreetHistoricalSociety project hopes to “call out forces of neighborhood change.”</span></span></p>Alexis Zanghihttp://www.citylab.com/authors/alexis-zanghi/?utm_source=feedElihu RubinThe new Alexion building, part of the ambitious Downtown Crossing project can be seen behind a sign made by Elihu Rubin's students.Making a Better City Out of 'Model City'2016-09-28T08:00:00-04:002016-09-28T09:14:43-04:00tag:citylab.com,2016:209-499679<span>In New Haven, a student-driven signage project and a government-led redevelopment take different approaches to addressing mistakes made decades ago.</span><p><em>Heimat</em> is a German word with no direct translation in English, like <em>schadenfreude</em>, or <em>zeitgeist</em>. It describes the relationship between a person and their built environment, somewhere between the feeling of home and homeland. Since August of 2015, Germany has become home to more than 1.1 million refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers. This influx has German architects and urban planners asking the question: “Do we have a refugee crisis on our hands? Or a housing crisis combined with huge challenges to the ability of cities, job markets, and schools to integrate the newcomers?”</p><p><a href="http://www.makingheimat.de/en"><em>Making Heimat: Germany, Arrival Country</em></a> is Germany’s publication for the starchitectural extravaganza that is the 2016 Venice Biennale. Featuring writing from prominent German architects, urban planners, and sociologists, <em>Making Heimat </em>examines how to create immigrant communities in today’s Germany and builds on the lessons from Doug Saunders’ 2011 book <a href="http://arrivalcity.net/"><em>Arrival City</em></a>. Published well before the current diaspora to Europe, Arrival City argues that the ad hoc, self-determined neighborhoods that emerge out of mass migrations, termed “arrival cities,” are integral to integrating newcomers in their destination country. Saunders contributes an essay to <em>Making Heimat</em>. In it, he cautions that arrival cities are “where the new creative and commercial class will be born, or where the next wave of tension and violence will erupt.” The difference, he adds “depends on how we approach these districts both organizationally and politically, and, crucially, in terms of physical structures and built form.”</p><p>The cities of Hamburg and Berlin have come up with two different approaches to designing arrival cities.</p><h3>Arriving in Berlin</h3><p>Chances are you’ve been to an arrival city before. The Lower East Side was once one. So was London’s Bethnal Green. In these self-determined cities-within-cities, housing solutions are often organic and improvised—think tenement housing and cold-water flats, with smaller rooms and larger communal spaces. The cost of living is low, and it’s located close to public transportation and economic opportunity. From market stalls to halal butchers to corner kiosks, ethnic entrepreneurship thrives in the arrival city, which becomes the primary point of entry for newly-arrived immigrants.</p><!-- START "RELATED STORY" SINGLE STORY BOX v2.0 --><aside class="callout related"><hr><h4 class="module-tag">Related Story</h4>
<figure><a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/06/how-migrants-have-reconfigured-europe-in-1-map/487190/?utm_source=feed"><img alt="" src="http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/2016/06/Screen_Shot_2016_06_15_at_5.33.41_PM/lead_large.png?1466026472"></a></figure><h4 class="hed"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/06/how-migrants-have-reconfigured-europe-in-1-map/487190/?utm_source=feed">How the Migrant Crisis Has Changed Europe</a></h4>
<p class="dek"><a href="http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/06/how-migrants-have-reconfigured-europe-in-1-map/487190/?utm_source=feed">A Pew Research Center analysis shows that the influx of refugees has dramatically increased the share of immigrants in many countries.</a></p>
<hr></aside><!-- END "RELATED STORY" SINGLE STORY BOX --><p>Most of all, the arrival city is by immigrants, and for immigrants.</p><p>Berlin’s Kreuzberg district was first established as an arrival city in the 1970s by Turkish men who had traveled to West Germany as part of its <em>gastarbeiter</em> (guest worker) program. Initially, these men lived in dormitories, until their employers realized that workers were more productive when they were happy. Guest workers’ families then joined them, and the men moved out of the dorms and into Kreuzberg. Along the Berlin Wall in Kreuzberg, the rents were cheap. More importantly, landlords were willing rent to Turks.</p><p>Today, Kreuzberg is a mix of first- and second-generation holdovers from the 1970s migration, arty Berliners, hipster tourists, and English-speaking expats from the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere. Shabby-chic bars and white cube art galleries push up against kebab houses and hookah lounges. Saunders describes it as having “gone from disreputable to fashionable in a generation.”</p><p>But for all the cocktails and kebabs, Kreuzberg still plays host to new arrivals in Germany. It’s become a ground zero for Berlin’s refugee advocacy movement since asylum seekers occupied a disused school building in 2013. This past weekend, the refugee rights group Women in Exile held a rally there, seeking, among other things, more viable housing solutions for refugees and asylum seekers.</p><h3>From Kreuzberg to Neuk<span>ö</span>lln</h3><p>In Berlin, the housing process for migrants goes something like this: First, newcomers register and declare their intent to seek asylum at the State Office for Health and Social Affairs, commonly called the LaGeSo. From there, they are assigned to large reception centers, or <em>lagers</em>, which house hundreds to thousands of asylum seekers at a time. The primary <em>lager</em> is located in a hangar at the former Tempelhof airport. (In response to record delays at the central LaGeSo location, the office has recently announced a second location will open on-site at Tempelhof itself.)</p><p>After these massive reception centers, refugees and asylum seekers are then relocated to smaller state <em>heims</em> or refugee hostels, while they wait for their claims to be processed.</p><figure><img alt="" height="413" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/2016/08/Screen_Shot_2016_08_11_at_12.43.12_PM/0ebc49de8.png" width="620"><figcaption class="caption">Cabins are set up inside Hanger 4 of the former airport Tempelhof to be used as a temporary emergency shelter for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Berlin. . (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)</figcaption></figure><p>In an email, Barbara Caveng, a Swiss artist who works with asylum seekers, described life in the <em>heims</em>: “In this extraordinary living situation you don't have a ordinary ‘day-by-day’ life.” Asylum seekers go to the doctor and meet with case workers, take language classes and search for schooling options for their children. Most of all, Caveng says, “They search for permanent apartments. Everybody is waiting for the delivery of mails [sic]. A letter can decide about your destiny in one second.”</p><p>Eventually, some asylum seekers do find a permanent apartment. But this lengthy process, combined with Berlin’s already-crowded and extremely regulated housing market, presents challenges to the inherently organic nature of arrival cities.</p><p>Berlin’s Neuk<span>ö</span>lln neighborhood is just south of Kreuzberg and home to the Tempelhof <em>lager</em>. It’s also host to a project that <em>Making Heimat</em> identifies as a possible housing solution for Berlin and its immigrants. Designed by Praeger Richter architecture and loosely inspired by the work of Chilean architect and Venice Biennale curator Alejandro Aravena, the Neuk<span>ö</span>lln Ausbauhaus incorporates 24 units for living and working. Like Aravena’s “incremental” housing plans, Ausbauhaus occupants can choose between different degrees of completion to their unit. The result is low-cost, high-density housing units that allow for mixed use—exactly the kind of flexible housing that facilitates the growth of arrival cities. (The Ausbauhaus has since won the 2016 Architekturpreis.)</p><h3>Finding Places in Hamburg</h3><p>While Berlin is a city of neighborhoods, Hamburg is a canal city that is anchored by its central (“Mitte”) borough, which boasts High Street and luxury shopping, museums and galleries, bars with 20-euro cocktails, and a Rolls Royce dealership. It’s also slated to accept 80,000 asylum seekers by the end of 2016.</p><p>As of April, Hamburg had accommodated 39,000 asylum seekers through as series of emergency measures, ranging from tent cities on its periphery to confiscating commercial property for refugee housing. But the city eventually wants to re-settle refugees evenly throughout its seven boroughs. In <em>Making Heimat</em>, German sociologist Walter Siebel cautions that “refugees in such specially constructed settlements would remain isolated both from Germans and from their integrated compatriots.” A scenario, he adds, “that might merit the label, ‘a planned ghetto.’”</p><p>These concerns are also echoed by newcomers themselves. Anas Aboura, a Syrian activist and organizer who immigrated to Germany in October 2015, hopes for a collaborative approach to resettlement, incorporating mentorships and cultural exchanges. Never without his neon yellow wayfarer sunglasses, Aboura works with a number of organizations within Hamburg to plan culturally inclusive events like advocacy conferences, refugee movie nights, Arabic karaoke parties, and demonstrations of Syrian urban gardening techniques. In an interview conducted in his office at the performing arts center Kampnagel, Aboura emphasized the need for culturally sensitive approaches to integration, “one of the main aims is that I want to show to Germans that our culture is so rich, and people like it so much. Integration works both ways.”</p><p>Hamburg’s refugee resettlement approaches have met with criticism from the right, too. In April, residents of Hamburg’s wealthy Blankenese district staged a protest that <em>Der Spiegel</em> described as “egoism with a racist side effect.” Blankenese neighbors used their limousines and yachts to blockade the streets and prevent trees from being cut down to make room for refugee housing. (While protesters maintained that it was all about saving the trees, Speigel pointed out the carbon emissions of maintaining large town cars and even larger boats.)</p><p>A new partnership between Hamburg’s HafenCity University (HfC) and MIT’s CityScienceLab, called FindingPlaces, seeks to bridge these concerns through community input. Residents from each of Hamburg’s seven districts meet for workshops at HfC to identify possible sites for additional housing using data visualization tools and 3-D models of the city. After residents identify potential locations, city officials review them for zoning considerations and environmental concerns.</p><p>MIT’s Kent Larson noted that more than 30 such locations had been vetted and approved by Hamburg’s city government, allowing for 7,000-8,000 of a target 20,000 units. Larson suggests that FindingPlaces’ collaborative approach allows for better problem-solving. “For most of these complex urban challenges, you either have well-structured, top-down processes or a bottom-up process, and you rarely have a workable bottom-up process. I believe that the people in the community have the best local knowledge,” Larson said over the phone in July, adding that the workshops circumvent the social “echo chamber” that can emerge around immigration. “These workshops force people with different viewpoints to come together and meet face to face and hopefully develop a better understanding of the values and concerns that they may not have agreed with initially.”</p><p>When asked if members of the community included refugees and asylum seekers, Larson concedes that they haven’t been included—yet. But he adds that CityScienceLab hopes to incorporate input from newcomers to Hamburg as the project moves to its next phase, designing the communities themselves: “Ultimately what we're looking at with our tools is how to create healthy, high performance communities, and how do we take advantage of all the systems related to how people live and work…to create places that are much more livable and healthy.”</p><p>A community that collectively and efficiently uses its resources to facilitate growth and inclusion sounds like an arrival city. Through intuitive design, projects like Ausbauhaus and CityScienceLab are working to empower Germany’s newcomers to feel heimat once more.</p>Alexis Zanghihttp://www.citylab.com/authors/alexis-zanghi/?utm_source=feedMarkus Schreiber/APMigrants arrive at the central registration center for refugees and asylum seekers LaGeSo (State Office for Health and Social Affairs) in Berlin, January 2016. The Importance of 'Arrival Cities'2016-08-18T09:00:00-04:002016-08-18T10:12:30-04:00tag:citylab.com,2016:209-494189Germany has taken in over a million refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers since August 2015. The ad hoc neighborhoods that will emerge out of this period are critical for integration.